Switching To Unreal Engine After 10 Years In Unity 

Bro just dodged a bullet with this move

Who's here after the Unity's announcement of charging per install

In my opinion, it depends on what you (mostly) want to do, and what kind of a person you are: If you want to do "a shooter", or "an action game", or just in general a game that neatly fits into any of the classic genres, you should choose Unreal. Also, if you know nothing about programming (and don't really want to learn too much about its technical side), you should choose Unreal. If, however, your game idea(s) are more experimental, not really fitting into any classic genres, and/or if you know/enjoy programming, or if you want to learn programming in-depth, writing actual code, then you should choose Unity. Why: Unreal is, I like to call it, a golden cage. The whole engine is designed with lots of built-in defaults that make assumptions about what kind of a game you're making. If you really ARE making that kind of a game, those defaults will be a blessing for you, because without having to put too much effort into it, stuff will just work, and it will work out in your favor. There's always The Unreal Way of doing things for everything, which lets you not have to think too much about the technical side of things (unless you want to), and you'll be able to just follow The Way, and things will work out nicely. Also blueprints are very friendly to non-programmers. However, as soon as your game idea doesn't fit any of the classic genres, as soon as you need or want to do something your way, instead of The Unreal Way, all the assumptions and defaults that the engine has, and The Unreal Way imposes on you, will fight you every frikkin step of the way, and even the simplest thing will turn into royal pain where before you can even start doing the thing, you'll have to spend twice as long removing all those defaults, fighting your way out of that golden cage. Also, its documentation is shit, and its community is royally unhelpful (and on this, a professional Unreal Engine dev of 15 years wholly agrees with me), but on the other hand, most of the stuff in the engine is more or less included in the visual UI, and can be set up by clicking menus and stuff. What you need to click is sometimes hidden in very obscure menus and dialogs, but in theory, if you spend poking around the UI for long enough, you will find it. The documentation, and even answers from community, however very often boil down to "It's easy, you just click this button". However, nobody will actually tell you where that button is, and you often find, after literally HOURS of looking, that it's in some tab of some popup window that you open from a submenu of a dropdown button labeled by three dots in a specific line in a side bar of a specific component properties. Unity takes the opposite approach - it's an empty universe. The upside is, there isn't really any The Unity Way of doing things - however you want to do a thing, you can, in 98% of cases. The downside is - most of everything you want to have in your game, you will have to make from scratch (or pull in from some library/asset, and those are of... wildly varying quality, often very clunky and obnoxious). Another downside is that if you don't think about stuff like your project structure, and how the game will work on a technical level, your code will very soon become a horrible, clunky, buggy, janky, slow, inefficient mess. On the other hand, the documentation is AMAZING, Unity is one of the only dev tools where if I want a question answered, my first, and in most cases last stop, is the actual official documentation. On top of that, community, even though often slightly lacking in knowledge and skill, is extremely friendly and helpful. And ON TOP OF THAT, the programming API is, to a very large degree, self-documenting. I've learned approximately as much about Unity by just poking in the code editor and reading the intellisense suggestions and toying around trial-and-error style, as I've learned from tutorials and docs. It's intuitive (at least to me), clear, and usually simple, straightforward. Therefore, in unity, whatever crazy unusual gameplay idea(s) you have, you can just open a new project, and start implementing them right away, and gradually fill that empty universe with them, which is (to me) much more satisfying than having to fight the unreal's populated default environment. For example, making something like Pedestrian in Unreal would be a royal pain in the ass, in my opinion. That's the type of thing Unity is better for, due to how unusual the mechanics are, so starting from an empty universe is the better approach. HOWEVER, it also means, that: In unreal, you can get a pretty good result without really knowing what you're doing, and just letting the engine handhold you through the process. In unity, this isn't possible for real projects - in unity, if you don't really know what you're doing, it shows, IN A BIG WAY. This is where the "unity jank" stereotype comes from. In unity, if you want to achieve a good result, you actually have to learn the technical ins and outs of the engine, as well as be at least an average programmer, you will need to take time to make sure your code is actually good, you will have to take time and energy to set up things correctly (and to even learn and understand HOW to set them up correctly), you will have to take time and energy to design your own structure for the project, for the code, for how everything interacts and fits together... otherwise you'll end up crushed under a flaming pile of shit kind of mess.

I bet you're feeling pretty great about this decision after the Unity's changes to their fee structure the other day =)

that video suddenly became highly relevant

Perspective of AAA UE programmer rather having a solo project in Godot: I won't list UE upsides here, but the biggest downsides are: - Source control. Blueprints are binary asset, so you move a node and your source control only sees changed binary asset. It's like that for many things. - Blueprints. They are fine for artists and simple setup (this switch links to that door) but anything more still needs programmer mindset and at that point, they are just slowing you down. Add to it the previous point and yeah, they are bad. - Size. That engine is big in every sense of the word. Download is big, startup is long, building from source takes hours. Changing your cpp and restarting engine to restart the game takes minutes. Branching takes ages, switching and rebuilding branch takes ages... - Bonus point: Complexity. If you are one person in an army of people and do only animations for example, UE will have a slew of tools just for you. If you are trying to make a game "solo", you'll need to understand many workflows like that. You cannot "ignore" the complexity of something even when you don't really need it.

lol, mans was ahead of his time. Hope you've been enjoying Unreal!

Great Video. I have also switched from Unity to Unreal, and as a Software Engineer I despised the idea of using Blueprints instead of C++. After I gave it some time it really became second nature and my preferred way of writing code. I never thought this would be possible, and it is so much faster than writing and compiling C++ code. Best of luck to you guys :)

@SkookumArts - one year into the switch to Unreal (after 10 years in Unity) and in light of Unity's new drama, imagine we're all curious to hear your takes on everything.

Considering recent events, this is quite a prescient decision you guys made!

Unreal isn't open source, it's source available, which is very different.

Looks like you guys really picked a great time to switch lol. Dodged a bullet.

you made a quick decision friend because unity will strat to charge money for download

would seem you made the right decision hearing todays news

IMO the biggest advantage to Unreal is also its biggest drawback, and that's the fact that the engine already has so much functionality built into it. One the one hand, it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something simple like make a character jump or crouch. On the other hand, it means if you want to implement jumping or crouching in a different way from how the engine does it, you'd better be prepared to bash your head against a brick wall for a few days while you struggle to figure out what obscure aspect of the built-in functionality isn't playing nice with your modifications. I've been in and out of game dev in some capacity for a decade now and have completed projects in both engines, and at the end of the day I've settled on Unreal as my engine of choice. All the features it comes with are just too useful to pass up, but goddamn I do sometimes envy how lightweight and unbloated Unity seems by comparison.

You guys dodged a bullet, eh?

Unreal Con: Documentation is all over the place or not at all. Look for something about 5.1? Nope, nothing, you find deprecated 4.x stuff ,they change or removed some command and there's no way of knowing how to do the same exact thing now. Find some API documentation, no example how to use it. Spent hours trying to automate changing the skeletal mesh of assets today, no luck at all. Yeah I really want to click in a field to filter, then select the skeleton, then click okay 200 times, thanks Epic, you're a real mother and that's only half a word. The other con is the TERRIBLE GUI of the launcher, hello, I don't need 256x256 pixel icons for the 500 assets I downloaded to test, found out they are junk or the 85 gigabyte city demo that gave my computer graphics card a brain hemorage and I'll never use. At least a decade of complaints on their forums about that, and they never listened. "Oh we make billions of dollars from Fortnite, big F you developers, eat a bag of raw sausages!"

awesome video. I think my biggest gotcha in the last 7 years in UE is understanding how the editor handles migration of assets from one project to another and how it deals with references. I wish I would have learned to right click - "fix up redirectors" on content browser folders sooner, I usually do it on the root to make sure they're all handled. I have a project with 70GB of assets in it and it's been my master project for what I'm working on. It was really difficult to migrate what I need to focus on to a blank project before I understood what was going on with references under the hood but I finally got the hang of it and have been able to optimize into a new master version of the project without all the unused assets.

This really aged well lol

One thing that I've been noticing that more experienced C++ developers I talked to didn't mind as much: The state of the API documentation in Unreal. In Unity, for all the common API methods you get a longer description and even usage examples, and you can filter the method documentation per Unity version. Unreal also has a per version method page, but their documentation for it (C++ especially but also Blueprints) often doesn't tell you more than if you just looked at the method name and parameters yourself. It is pretty hard for beginners to get into. This has caused me to frequently check other resources to understand how certain blueprint methods or C++ methods work and how to use them (for example "Mathew Wadstein" on RU-vid has a great video on explaining invidivual Blueprint nodes and how to apply them)

You guys should go buy a lottery ticket

Man, the whole unity situation is funny and add up in the end.

Ive been working on Unity for about 5 yrs now and about 2 yrs ago I started using Unreal. While my day job is still with Unity and mobiled, for my personal projects I am by now using only Unreal. Sometimes I'm still shocked of how many features there are in the engine for which you needed plugins from asset store in Unity. There is quite steep learning curve and a lot to get a hold of but after that it became at least for me very intuitive. My last selling point was when Unreal 5 also adapted and ecs system, that's what I was lacking and also allowed for properties for animation logic to be accessed from side threads and not from the main gameplay thread which was a huge bottle neck. Yes, in comparison to C# especially when writing gameplay code Cpp can feel nightmarish but it is just a question of time and getting used to it. But it's a price of a faster code given that blueprints have a similar performance to C# and can also be compiled natively which I guess compares to Unity il2cpp compilation process. BP graphs does not beed to be horrifically complex if you break them into functions and macros and remember to replace performance critical chunks with functions and methods written in cpp. Good luck guys! Looking forward to your shared experiences with the new workflow!

The biggest issue I’ve had with Unreal so far is that Engine sometimes crushes with really obscure errors. Today, I’ve spent the whole day fixing an error that crashed the engine when the editor boots up, effectively preventing me from accessing my project. It’s also harder to find people who have had the same problem as it has a much smaller community compared to unity.

cons : 1-too much to learn 2-c++ knowledge combined with blueprint (it will take time and effort to learn) 3-project building problems (its slow and it can show errors after waiting for too long) 4-hard to fix glitches 5-exporting 3d models with texture (it requires some work 6-giving up

The buggy and unfinished features also apply to UE... I've experienced it myself and often hear from piers that there are a lot of bugs (in the new World Partition, One-file-per-actor or other tools) and unfinished features (like the procedural foliage tool) within unreal. So be prepared to fiddle around a lot and not be sure if a system is just buggy. lacking features or if you just made a mistake using it. Also, while blueprints are easy to use and pick up, using C++ is way slower and complex in unreal than C# is in Unity. Expect a 3-4 times increase in time it takes to develop a feature. This is especially true when compiling the engine, as you might want to do. Compiling the engine takes ages and requires you to really know what you are doing. Also, unreal is best when making "typical" unreal games, like FPS, third person stuff games. A lot of their tooling has been build around it. If you are making something super custom (like your "playing captured animations backwards" mechanic) really prototype things out and see if unreal can handle that. Implementing those kinds of features yourself is especially difficult in UE, because of the huge amount of complex systems they have. Some smaller points: UE deprecates a lot of API stuff from minor version to version. Expect breaking code when switching versions. Also try to get access to the internal Unreal Developer Forums. There you can actually get answers to your questions, and many epic employees try to help out there. Anyway, I wish you good luck on your endeavor :)

I have been dabbling in Real Time filmmaking and I actually went opposite and went from Unreal to Unity. The HDRP is amazing and I just prefer working in Unity, it's faster and like you said waaay more responsive. Unreal was crashing constantly. That was my experience. With Unitys aquisition of WETA FX tools and their Enemies tech demo they will have some really cool next gen stuff coming in the future

Here are my pros/cons about Unreal Engine. I recently switched to Unreal (about 1 month ago). I really liked it and my new favorite game engine (have used Unity almost 5+ years now). Pros: - Blueprint is well integrated and not just an afterthought. You will work seamlessly with it. My initial thought was I was only too work with C++ and never with Visual Scripting. After a week, Blueprint doesn't seem that bad. However, switch to C++ after three weeks, since I love programming. Still uses Blueprint to hand in hand with C++. Like a matching couple. It's a perfect solution for game development. - Most tools are well-intergrated to each other - C++ is not hard, really hard when you get the hang of it. Helps when you know about C#. But can be frustrated when C++ doesn't have all features or weird syntax compare to C#. - Most of the negative stuff I have about Unreal is just "pet peeves" overall I'm happy with my decision. Great engine! Unreal is really focused at making video games and offers great tools. - SoundCue/MetaSounds are really cool tools for making sound interactions. - It supports Network right out of the box. - A lot of handing components/tools. Like ProjectileMovementComponent, CharacterMovementComponent, MovementComponent, RotatingMovementComponent. It took less than 5 minutes to create a spinning coin that moves up and down. - It has an amazing asset called ALS (Advanced Locomotion System), that is free to use. And it has Project Acoustics by Microsoft, really awesome tool for audio development (Ray tracing for audio system, also free). Unreal is also working on making motion matching. Mid: - Unreal's Architecture - I couldn't decide either is a pro/con, is both. You will learn that some specifics class is supposed to do one thing and class inheritance is important as well naming conversions and terms. For an example, you need to learn what: Pawn, Controller, Character, Game Instance, Game State, Actor, etc. You might think well that's complicated, but once you learn all about it. It kinda makes sense. Recommend watching Alex Forsythe's video on "Blueprints vs. C++: How They Fit Together and Why You Should Use Both". Cons: - Poor Documentation. Unreal lacks API docs compare to Unity. Also, just examples and guide on their site is not best either. - Poor integration with Visual Studio. You create scripts inside Unreal, not Visual Studio. And intellisense is not very respondent with C++ code. Also, removing/renaming scripts in Unreal is a pain in the ass. - You can't use "scene-view" and "game-view" at the same time. When you start the game, only one can be chosen. Unless you pause the game and exit "game-view" into "scene-view". - Unreal is using "cm" instead of "m" as Unit. You cannot change it. However, in "inspector" or "details panel" as they called. You can mark variables with unit attribute, which can be easily converted on the UI side (Read more on benui - UPROPERRTY Units). - Unreal doesn't have a drag and drop reference system like Unity has. It was so nice with Unity, just to drag and drop Components/GameObjects inside the Inspector. - Unreal lacks supports for different file formats (like .mp3, .DAE). - World Partition has some limitations. I could only create 10^2 km map without glitching out. I think they are implemented in double precision, which should increase size limitations. - Nanite don't work (right now) with foliage. They are introducing in Unreal 5.1, I think (You can read their roadmap). - Marketplace is really high cost for some asset. Also, a lot less assets compare to Unity. And also horrible UI design for Marketplace. - I couldn't find any information about Machine Learning, when it comes down to AI. Where Unity already have some Machine Learning package to work with

Good bulletpoints. Good analysis. I usually focus more on the "preference analysis" approach (as you can see from my other comment), but your breakdown from the... let's call it more objective angle is good.

As a hobbyist, I started with Unity a few years ago because Unreal didn't run well on Linux, looked complicated, and I couldn't stand the big icon buttons (UE 4). After the recent Unity drama, switched to Unreal, and when trying to do similar things, found myself always thinking, 'oh, so that's what that feature / tool / process is supposed to do'. Somehow Unreal is just much clearer, just looks so much better with little effort

And boom goes the dynamite

7:46 "There's still potential for Unity. Who knows where they're gonna go in the future" Hits pretty hard right about now lol

I think unreal is going to be every experienced choice eventually, but not the choice for beginners just because unity holds your hands while unreal yeet you to the documents and wish you well

"Who knows where they're gonna go in the future" 👀 sounds a bit different now

Biggest cons I know when being a beginner (me doing unreal sincer 2013 UE2.5): Blueprints is probably the most beginner friendly way to program. However it is not as efficient/fast as C++. Usually that does not matter, but it could. C++ however is a lot harder to learn/understand/master than C# for example. However you can do anything with both Bluepritn AND C++. You can even make your own blueprints using C++. And C++ is probably the fastest out there besides assembly. The UI might look like there is sooo much and you're getting overwhelmed BUT after a few days its not like that at all, and you will see it is alll you need and actually kinda simple.

My biggest issue is C++. I just don't like it, and I don't care to use it. I love the direction things are headed with DOTS, which can, in a number of ways, help make up that performance difference. The other major thing for me is extensibility of the editor itself. I spend most of my time making editor tools, because I just enjoy it.

I have found myself slowly slipping away to Unreal as well, I've discovered it to be much faster to iterate on with specific styles of games. If you're working on anything first or third person, targeting a PC or console market. It will do almost everything you ask of it. However when you start to drift away from conventional game design I have it found it harder to work with. Also a few other things from the video I had thoughts on: - Love Unitys store, lots of regular sales and assets are such a wide range! - Unreal, unless it is free that month or forever. Lots of things will be very pricey since Epic curates a lot more on their store and you will find less of a range to select from and less of a budget to spend because things are $$$ - Unreals source is available to look at, but technically isn't 'open source'. It's a bit of a weird area you have to be careful on. - Unreal being slow, I found CPU it be a bigger bottleneck since it still does a lot of processing there. Also just working in engine with lower settings does help speed things up. If you are not specifically working on visuals at the time, turn your settings down as low as you can. - No other engine in the world can compete with Unity forums - At the end of the day you could argue endlessly between Unity, Unreal, Godot, Flax, GameMaker etc Understanding what you want to make first, how you plan to make it and what tools / pipeline would benefit you the most really is the deciding factor. If you hate compile times don't use unreal, if you want visual scripting don't use godot... I think you have made the right decision with changing to unreal though, once you start to understand the quirks of the engine and really lean into it's strengths, you'll find yourself spending less time on learning the engine and more time focusing on development.

my pain points using ue5: - retargeting skeletal meshes is still really painful (needs manual fiddling to make it work, hard to map animations from one skeleton to another) - the concept of animation graph and the connection to your regular player controller blueprints / C++ is somewhat complex to grasp when you are getting started - collision channels (physics, nonphysics, or both, overlap and hit responses) should be well understood to avoid debugging collisions later - you need decent hardware to run it (minimum specs: 32GB, RTX 2060, i9 10900k, or 5800X CPU at least in my opinion) - plugin system can be a mess (compatibility issues, outdated plugins need to be recompiled and sometimes the source has to be fixed to make it work with a new engine version until plugin developers update the plugin to latest) - understanding and setting up lighting can be hard ( I can recommend William Faucher's youtube channel for correct understanding and setup of lights, he's an excellent tutor and a great guy, too) Thank you for your video, enjoy the ride! Regards, RAGD

i just discovered your channel and it is awesome

ok, dunno if you'll see this 8 months later but here are some things about Unreal to keep in mind: - with great power comes great responsability. Unreal will crash more often when you don t know what you want to do. For example, i was following an Unreal course and Unreal decided to crash when I created a material. That never happened to me with Unity. And Unreal kept crashing over and over again when i was interacting with that material. Of course, as an Unreal new user, the last thing you want to do is understanding the whole engine so that you understand when and why it crashes - you have to keep up with Unreal. If you want to make a game AND use megascans from the store, you have to make all the models created by you fit with that quality. That also includes game design, sound design and others. I don't know how big your team is, but if you want to make AAA games with a small team, you will have issues. Everything will have to be over polished to keep up with the megascans - also, if you use megascans, you need to take into consideration the future. Since everyone else will use the same megascans, every other game will look the same which will lead to player eye fatigue. Now the features are quite new and not a lot of games have been released using the megascans, but in the future, everything will look the same. If you want to do stylized work, then everything i said here is useless :) That's kinda it! Hope your transition goes well!

Advice: Understand that everything you see in the editor can be created in C++. You don’t have to edit the engine. Create your own plug-in with all of the features your game will ever need. Blueprints are a great place to prototype, then you would move the code to C++.

After 5 years I also switched to Unreal and will never go back. I am both a game developer and an asset store publisher and I have lost faith in Unity which just focuses on nice videos and mobile games. On the other hand, Unreal shows real progress and they wait to have a working product before talking about it. What I do miss about Unity tho is c#, because coding in c++ is annoying as hell. Just this morning I spent 2h fixing a bug to then realize it was a false positive by Visual Studio... Edit: I see a lot of comments about Unity and DOT. Just google Unreal Mass Entity, Unity didn't invent anything.

Would love to hear peoples opinions on engines for VR. Currently using Unity since I plan to develop for Quest/standalone

Using UE since 1 year (I have a background in cinematography and advertisement). Never used Unity so take my words with a grain of salt. So far it's a love-hate relationship with UE. My crash dump is several hundred megabytes big. Auto-saves never work. I can brew some coffee or do my weekly chores when booting up a project for the first time. It's such a heavy piece of software that I had to upgrade to a 3090ti to get my s**t done on time. The folder structure is super weird and clunky. Sometimes you don't even know if UE is bugging out or you did something to startle it. That all sucks so so much! And then ... then it surprises you with the most jaw dropping and awe-inspiring visuals and god-send innovations like Lumen and Nanite. It keeps pushing your creative boundaries. It's freaking FREE!!! It helps you grow as an artist and THAT feeling is nothing short of liberating. I just keep coming back to UE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Welcome to the club ;) Had over 10 years myself and sold stuff in the Unity store. Now it's All Unreal

Thanks for sharing your thought process. I'm currently in the same boat and thinking about switching from Unity to Unreal.

I switched to unreal after 3-4 yrs in Unity, and I'm happy

I would probably spend the time to learn how to enhance the visuals in Unity, instead of spending more time learning a completely new engine from scratch. You have been using Unity for over a decade, don't underestimate that advantage.

only 4 real con about Unreal I found after using it for 6 month: 1/ Its huge and heavy. Not for typical laptop. You "NEED" decent laptop / pc to make a decent game. 2/ Its does not use strimline nameing or system or method. Its like unreal comes from another univers. almost everything is uniq to it. so if you migrate to it recently you will use google pretty often. 3/ Its does not have many resourse. If i say it more clearly... Unreal does not have on-point resourse. 4/ assets pipeline, you can use same assets in both godot and unity directly from godot. How ever unreal has issue of scale. it will messed up you animetion and uv. How ever there is a plugins SendToUnreal solved this problem, mostly.

My main reason to choose UE was - blueprints, I'm not a programmer so this is the easiest way to start coding gameplay, of course you must know basic principles and etc, but its much easier to start than C#. I really like how many great tools UE has built-in and you don't need to have a ton of marketplace stuff to make you own game.

It’s all depend on your project type. Both are great in their own space.

It's a great choice for you guys!!

I was switching to UE as well after 10 years of using Unity. Its nothing personal its just depends on each project. Its been nearly 2 years since i switched and i can say if you want to take advantage of cpp than its going to be hard since the documentation and resources are much less available than in comparison to unity

It's a minor thing, but if you guys are using C++ to make the game.. Umm.. remember to check for null pointers, when Unity comes to a null pointer it shows a nice little error in the console window, but when Unreal comes across a null pointer, it's game over man, it's game over.. and the engine crashes. So just make sure you check for nullptr and it'll be fine :)

I was a developer in Unity for about 5-6 years and I took the step to UE almost 3 years ago. Best decision you'll ever make, you can look at my channel to see my current project if you're curious

Hey guys, Id like to make a follow-up video request, now that you guys are working with Unreal for over a year, and considering all of your experience with it and Unity, how do you compare them now? In which areas would you still prefer unity, if any? would be really good to get some more insight with more experience

The first thing I would personally look at is version control and backup system. I have not really had too many issues in UE5, however, I have had a couple, it may have been my fault but I would have preferred to roll back my changes than diagnose it. UE5 is still new so there will be some issues. I also would look at trying to be careful about just throwing in nanite objects everywhere because you can, assets such as trees and bushes really have issues with it and it all still comes at a penalty in resource usage. For speeding up blueprint compiling look into Blueprint Nativization as that Project Setting may help. If you really get into it, building pipelines for Asset validation and builds automation could really save significant time.

I teach Unreal at a University! Good choice. Let me know if you guys have any questions.

I think the 4th pro of UE is that it's made for people who want to make (high level, console style) games. I've seen 2D and side scrollers made in UE and they work fine. But it's easier and faster in Unity.

Im currently in the process of trying Unity. I plan to stick to a solo dev role and the problem with unreal. Its too much and requires alot of know how and expertise to modify despite it being „open source“. The problem is that if you want to make a good stylized shading system, the shader editor isn’t enough and you have to basically modify the source code which is something I am uninterested in. Learning how they built the engine and working within their architecture is also that would take alot of time adjusting to. I think its great if you have a team and trying to make a next gen experience

I loved the video. This was the last video that a assist that convince me to do right choice of switching. I was very annoyed with the way Unity is going forward, never finishing good tools and plugins. I'm think the could do that in the future, but for now is a mess. To do a game with quality you need to spend a lot in 3th plugins, or do a lot work/having to pay for that. The tools of the box are a shame. Thanks for the video! you're awesome, we be waiting for more updates about that transition!

I think you are 100% right. Since Unity is not focusing on fixing and polishing the main system (like the lighting) and I have to spend more money on a third party asset that will do the thing that Unity was supposed to do in the first place.... Thanks but no thanks. I work with Unity for almost a decade now and I totally agree, even though UE is 'heavier' and it takes longer to do some tasks, it does have more useful tools by default. But as you said, the fact that Unity is focusing more on those casual games might be the reason there is such a big difference between them.

"Unreal has been made by people that use it" that's enough to switch from unity to UE

I started to switch back to Unreal... Then I remembered why I hated it and kept using Unity. I've been using Unity since Version 3.4.2. The first time I've used Unreal, it was version 3. Unity has a similar setup (hotkey wise) to Maya and as a Maya user, everything feels better. Unreal takes a long time to compile shaders, lighting, etc. The biggest thing I HATE about Unreal, is setting up animations. Plus, I hate spaghetti code. Overall, I'm happy with Unity because of how easily and quickly I can fix any kind of issues I come across. So... for graphics, yes... Unreal is the way to go. There are so many more things that Unreal does for a user that makes it easy. But when it comes to particles, animations, coding, and setup. Unity has made it so much easier to get the results I need. Unity HDRP vs Unreal, I'm going to say Unreal has them beat. However, that does not mean that a beautiful game can not be made using the URP or HDRP. It just means that more work is required within Unity to get the results desired. I've used both engines and gone in-depth on both and I will never switch to Unreal because of issues I've encountered. Their particles systems, blueprints, animator systems, and because of how large project files become. (I.e. 10Gb in unity with Library compared to 43GB in Unreal)

The speedbump of learning C++ for Unreal is far easier to learn than the workarounds for broken features Unity. That is the ONLY reason you need to use Unreal.

10/10 intro :D

UE5 don't have good 2d tools. That's only one reason why i started to learn Unity. 2d mobile games are huge part of market and good start for beginners

Here's an idea: Open up blender, create a cube, fracture it. Apply physics on the pieces, press play and bake the explosion it makes to keyframes. Now try to import that into Unreal Engine. I dare you. If you succeed; please share 🤣

When I first wanted to start making games, I tried Unreal and absolutely hated the node system. It was like learning Blender, but with less documentation lol. I couldn't figure out what nodes I had at my disposal or how to use them... So, I tried Unity and loved that all I had to really do was learn C# and everything else was pretty simple. With Unreal it felt like I have to learn all these different systems AND figure out how they work together. I still want to really learn how to make something with Unreal but every time I open it I am immediately disheartened by the complexity. I've never played your games but from one game maker to another, I wish you the best of luck!

unity being "lightweight" its so funny lmao, compared to unreal, sure, but generally speaking, its huge

it's funny we migrated from unity to unreal at the end of the physical release of our last game, and we got through the exact same thought process

UE5 is absolutely amazing. Welcome!

I've been considering this, but the biggest con I see in the long-term is the 5% gross revenue royalty after the first $1M. Sure, most games don't ever reach a $1M lifetime revenue, but if/once they do, your engine costs can suddenly skyrocket. At a lifetime revenue of $1.2M, you're already paying Epic $10K, which is more or less the price of 5 Unity Pro yearly licenses, so you might become "the victim of your own success" down the line. 5% of gross revenue is potentially quite a big chunk of money.

I've been using Unity for so far 2 and half years, it's pretty easy, understandable, great engine, I think it's the best, I used unreal engine for 3 years, with Unreal Engine I haven't made much games as it's very complex if you just wants to make a material, but Unity for just 2 and half years I made so far 4 games, 2 of them is mobile games, the other 2 is for desktop and consoles, I just recommend to anyone who really wants to works on games and don't have much experience and like new to the industry, I think Unity is the best set for you.

I been messing with Unity and Unreal Engine and always found myself running back to Unreal Engine. Something about it grabs my attention outside of using visual scripting. I feel like I can prototype a lot faster with it. It does help that I have a strong computer 120900K with 64GB of DDR4, and a couple of M.2 plus a RTX 3080. However I send people using Unreal with less hardware than I have. It does help running demos and stuff like the Matrix demo having that amount of ram. I do like the interface better in Unreal Engine, I do like the programming better in Unity due to C#. Now with Unreal Engine 5.1 coming out soon it is going to optimized and fix a lot of the stuff to make it worth it for mobile development and other neat stuff. I just wish they had a template for 2D game development like they did in Unreal Engine 4. I have however develop two projects that is base in 2D with Unreal Engine. I found it I can get started way faster with Unreal Engine and I seem to get stuck with Unity for to long that I get frustrated. Importing old assets is Super easy with Unreal Engine than Unity.

I use Unreal Engine for more than a year and I've never used game engines before. And I don't use C++, only Blueprints. Cons are mostly the shader compiling, it takes hours. And the complex Lightning in Unreal must Be built also. An other con, is that Unreal is very huge. The Particle Editor, the Blueprint Systems, the AI Systems, the Material Editor etc. And you have to learn all this, to make the game you want. But at the end, at my opinion (without any experience in Unity) Unreal is the better game Engine.

Hey how's going guys

Unreal Engine is built and designed for teams. Unity is built and designed for solo developers. Yes you can use Unreal Engine as a Solo Developer and you can use Unity as a team, but your missing out. Typically Unreal is better for AAA Games and Computer/Console Games. Unity is better for Mobile/Web Games. Unity is better for 2D, Unreal is better for 3D. Note. This doesn't mean you have to use Unity for mobile games or Unreal for desktop games. It just means you'll likely have todo more work to get the results you want. Unity can certainly rival unreal for graphics, but it will require a lot more work on the developer to game the same results Unreal provides out of the box. I think a lot of Unity Developers fail to point out is that Unity Engine is actually very bare bones. Most Unity Developers have to construct their own tools that Unreal provides out of the box or buy them from the Asset store. On the inverse Unreal is far harder to learn and master then Unity. It can feel rather overwhelming for hobbiests. There is also this incorrect assumption by some Unity Developers that Unreal is more powerful, but its less flexible. Thats just wrong. Unreal is capable of making FPS, Turn Based Strategy, 2D Platformers, 3D Platformerrs, Open World RPGs, Fighting Games, Racing Games, Card Games, Puzzle Adventure games, and even absurd games(Goat Simulator) as unity. There is no reason to suggest that you should use Unity for X genre. This just an old myth.

we've been using Unreal Engine since it was first release in 2009 as UDK A.K.A. UE3 and YES is a BEAST!!! the best aspect of Unreal is it memory control which in unity is automatic garbage collection that's why big games are built in Unreal. Unity3d recently start working on adding more memory allocation and management.

you make graphics heavy games! Unreal will serve you well. unity is better for quick programming/prototyping.

sometimes you must modify the engine itself in order to get result you seek open source is big deal tbh

What a nice video i love it ! 🙂 can you tell us about HDRP in Unity thoughts about it ? do you think it handle 3d high games compared to unreal ? thanks!

Annoyingly, I've found both engines have their pros and their cons which makes it _very_ difficult to decide which one may be 'better'. But I do find Unreal is much better at rapid iterations and generally just "getting things working". It also feels more modern and much more cohesive, unlike Unity which often feels like a patchwork quilt of various old crap that hasn't been maintained or updated in years. I can get things working much more quickly in Unreal and it feels like less of a chore to do so, but Blueprints can be extremely intimidating to a newbie and can turn into spaghetti very quickly. You are absolutely right about Unity being loaded with unfinished, buggy features that never really go anywhere, not to mention the engine itself is so barebones that you have to install all sorts extra just to make it viable and more comfortable to use. For example, the new Input System and niceties like Cinemachine are first party and Unity recommend you use them rather than handhacking everything - so why aren't they default parts of the engine? They should be. But for some people the key selling point is that Unity seems more versatile in the sorts of games you can create (really anything, including a sudoku game for Android if you like). Meanwhile Unreal Engine is really best suited for walking simulators, 3D adventure games, and shooters like Gears. You likely wouldn't use Unreal to make something like Pong or a sidescrolling 2D platformer.

I think the time being that a new project is started is a good enough reason to try something different or new, like your switch to Unreal. I don't agree with the statement that Unity's focus is mobile games. Unity does that well, but you can do much more. Thing is, the investments into higher tier features, which you can get with Unreal right now, have not taken fruit yet in Unity as they just acquired those assets and they have not been implemented.

The one con i had was that there aren't that many people using unreal like in unity. In unity you can just search something and you'll get it but in unreal, its kinda hard

Well that was a smart decision :D

OMG, do not rename files with version control... Unreal will create Redirector files ( much like meta files in Unity ) that will be hidden by default. You need to unhide those redirectors and then fix them manually if/when you want to rename multiple files. Speaking from experience where we renamed almost everything in the project.

Unity: Write your own C# if you want more or less anything. Unreal: Disable checkboxes until you get what you want.

It seems a lot of people are still making videos around unity being a "Mobile targeted engine" which isn't quite the whole story. The engine is built to be modular and work on many platforms such as tvs, switch, consoles, unix, webgl, mac, windows, vr, ar and many more. To put this into perspective here are some premium Unity games according to steam. Subnautica, The Forest, Cuphead, Rimworld, Bendy and the Inc machine So classing the engine as "Mobile only" or "Going in the direction of mobile games and micro transactions" just ticks me off whenever I hear it. I don't have much experience with Unreal but I'm sure it can make a much better looking game given the nature of its engine. Even with Unity's HDRP render pipeline making great strides lately it will never compete with Unreals graphics but it's certainly a great step up in history. After watching this video it does look like Unreal has a lot of stuff that is amazing with visualization but that is only if you need it. Someone like me I wouldn't use much of it like the blueprints, i'd straight up not use it as I'm a coder at heart - but others would greatly benefit from its ease of accessibility. You can make amazing games with all engines. Some have upsides compared to others and its just up to the individual to decide what to use for their kind of game and how they prefer to make games.

Unreal is not Open Source. It has it source available under certain conditions, but does not qualify as Open Source.

One of the definite Con of unreal is not able to do 2D, C++ can be a con base on how you look at it. It is almost too professional on the sense that it will take you some real learning to understand why certain feature are designed the way they are. Once you understand it, you feel all powerful and enlightened and want to really praise them, but until then, you are puzzled like a dog trying to learn physics.

Seems like you took the right decision at time

Listen, if y'all can make it pass UE's UI; You're 80% of the way there - lol 😂 I kid, I'm excited to see wheree this joureny takes y'all and I'm just grateful to be apart of it - even if i'm just watching the DevLog and liking your videos.

in my opinion, unity is better! but what? 1- Because I'm not a professional programmer and a lazy guy :D and unity using the c sharp language and unreal uses c++ which is so hard to learn at last for me 2-unity is so much faster than unreal engine I don't know why but compiling projects or compiling shaders even in HDRP projects is so much fast 3-code IntelliSense is not working for the unreal engine! *for me I searched about this problem and I found because the unreal engine has a heavy source code and code intelligence is not working too well ( it's so slow) 3- I'm not a professional guy, but Unity has two render pipelines (URP and HDRP) for high-graphic games (AAA games), and it's so realistic! Look at the layers of fear 2 (made in 2019) with unity. I think aaa games can be made by unity

Unreal is not 2D dev friendly. Not sure if that matters for you. Unreals documentation is rough especially on some of the newer features. Much younger community in the forums. That all said, Im still going to choose Unreal just beacuse of their dedication to the overall community. They will be fully integrating the marketplace right into the engine so you literally get the asset right into the project.

bois saw the future coming tbh

I am looking to switch from Unity to unreal, after 6 years with loving Unity. I have not decided yet. so just having a play around Unreal. Unity Cons: Disjointed confused direction. Too many choices, and incomplete bits (Render pipelines, lighting etc) Difficult to get that great looking game experience. Unity Pros: Familiarity, C# coding. Ability to develop WebGL browser Games. More general game development. Unreal: Clearer direction and focus. High level game concept support built in. Easy to get great looking games and terrains up and running. Unreal Cons: Unfamiliarity, I am not sure that I can really get to grips with Blueprints, at scale or be fully productive with graphical programming. (I guess I may have to buckle down to C++) Little to no support to WebGL/ Browser Applications. Big focus on first/third person games. I dunno really,

Hobby Unreal Engine user for 2.5 years. The biggest con I've found is the spaghetti code, such as you show at 3m 56s. However, I found that there is little to no performance decrease for using multiple references instead of having lines dragged everywhere. Having all your references close to your function makes readability SO much better. Once your code is tight, comment the bleep out of it. I can come back to a well commented program after 6 months and jump back in within moments. Just read the comments. UE can produce some of the worst spaghetti code you can imagine. Those old Obfuscated C challenges have nothing on UE for unreadable code. If you code right and tight, it can also produce the most clean and readable code I've ever produced.

2:50 UE4/5 is NOT "open source". It's "source available". An important distinction because it restricts what you can do with the source code. You cannot just fork it and redistribute it to anyone you want. Careful here.

Elder Scrolls Legends. Love the shirt. Hate what happened to that gem of a game